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Image of The City
Image of The City
1.
THE IMAGE OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight
may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but
one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time.
City design is therefore a temporal art, but it can rarely use the controlled and
limited sequences of other temporal arts like music. On different occasions
and for different people, the sequences are reversed, interrupted, abandoned,
cut across. It is seen in all lights and all weathers.
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can
hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by
itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events
leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. Washington Street set in a
farmer's field might look like the shopping street in the heart of Boston, and
yet it would seem utterly different. Every citizen has had long associations
with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and
meanings.
and can be organized into a coherent pattern. just as this printed page,
if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a related pattern of
recognizable symbols, so a legible city would be one whose districts or
landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped
into an over-all pattern.
This book will assert that legibility is crucial in the city setting, will
analyze it in some detail, and will try to show how this concept might
be used today in rebuilding our cities. As will quickly become
apparent to the reader, this study is a preliminary exploration, a first
word not a last word, an attempt to capture ideas and to suggest how
they might be developed and tested. Its tone will be speculative and
perhaps a little irresponsible: at once tentative and presumptuous. This
first chapter will develop some of the basic ideas; later chapters will
apply them to several American cities and discuss their consequences
for urban design.
Although clarity or legibility is by no means the only important
property of a beautiful city, it is of special importance
when considering environments at the urban scale of size, time,
and complexity. To understand this, we must consider not just the city
as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.
Structuring and identifying the environment is a vital ability among all
mobile animals. Many kinds of cues are used: the visual sensations of
color, shape, motion, or polarization of light, as well as other senses
such as smell, sound, touch, kinesthesia, sense of gravity, and perhaps
of electric or magnetic fields. These techniques of orientation, from the
polar flight of a tern to the path-finding of a limpet over the microtopography of a rock, are described and their importance underscored
in an extensive literature. 10, 20, 31, 59 Psychologists have also studied
this ability in man, although rather sketchily or under limited
laboratory conditions. 1,5,8,12,37,63,65,76,81 Despite a few
remaining puzzles, it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic
"instinct" of way-finding. Rather there is a consistent use and
organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment.
This organization is fundamental to the efficiency and to the
very survival of free-moving life.
obverse of the fear that comes with disorientation; it means that the
sweet sense of home is strongest when home is not only familiar but
distinctive as well.
Indeed, a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security
but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human
experience. Although life is far from impossible in the visual chaos of
the modern city, the same daily action could take on new meaning if
carried out in a more vivid setting. Potentially, the city is in itself the
powerful symbol of a complex society. If visually well set forth, it can
also have strong expressive meaning.
It may be argued against the importance of physical legibility that the
human brain is marvelously adaptable, that with some experience one
can learn to pick one's way through the most disordered or featureless
surroundings. There are abundant examples of precise navigation over
the "trackless" wastes of sea, sand, or ice, or through a tangled maze of
jungle.
Yet even the sea has the sun and stars, the winds, currents, birds, and
sea-colors without which unaided navigation would be impossible.
The fact that only skilled professionals could navigate among the
Polynesian Islands, and this only after extensive training, indicates the
difficulties imposed by this particular environment. Strain and anxiety
accompanied even the best-prepared expeditions.
In our own world, we might say that almost everyone can, if attentive,
learn to navigate in Jersey City, but only at the cost of some effort and
uncertainty. Moreover, the positive values of legible surroundings are
missing: the emotional satisfaction, the framework for communication
or conceptual organization, the new depths that it may bring to
everyday experience. These are pleasures we lack, even if our present
city environment is not so disordered as to impose an intolerable strain
on those who are familiar with it.
It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth,
or surprise in the environment. Many of us enjoy the House of
Mirrors, and there is a certain charm in the crooked streets of Boston.
This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no
danger of losing basic form or
orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an overall framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible
whole. Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some
form that can be explored and in time be apprehended. Complete chaos
without hint of connection is never pleasurable.
But these second thoughts point to an important qualification. The
observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and
have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the
power to change that image to fit changing needs. An environment
which is ordered in precise and final detail may inhibit new patterns of
activity. A landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult
the creation of fresh stories. Although this may not seem to be a
critical issue in our present urban chaos, yet it indicates that what we
seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous
further development.
Building the Image
Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the
observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions
and relations, and the observer with great adaptability and in the
light of his own purposes selects, organizes, and endows with
meaning what he sees. The image so developed now limits and
emphasizes what is seen, while the image itself is being tested against
the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process, Thus the
image of a given reality may vary significantly between different
observers.
The coherence of the image may arise in several ways. There may be
little in the real object that is ordered or remarkable, and yet its mental
picture has gained identity and organization through long familiarity.
One man may find objects easily on what seems to anyone else to be a
totally disordered work table. Alternatively, an object seen for the first
time may be identified and related not because it is individually
familiar but because it conforms to a stereotype already constructed by
the observer. An American can always spot the corner drugstore,
however indistinguishable it might be to a Bushman. Again, a new
object
most part these examples seem to echo, curiously enough, the formal
types of image elements into which we can conveniently divide the
city image: path, landmark, edge, node, and district. These elements
will be defined and discussed in Chapter 3.
Structure and Identity
An environmental image may be analyzed into three components:
identity, structure, and meaning. It is useful to abstract these for
analysis, if it is remembered that in reality they always appear
together. A workable image requires first the identification of an
object, which implies its distinction from other things, its recognition
as a separable entity. This is called identity, not in the sense of equality
with something else, but with the meaning of individuality or oneness.
Second, the image must include the spatial or pattern relation of the
object to the observer and to other objects. Finally, this object must
have some meaning for the observer, whether practical or emotional.
Meaning is also a relation, but quite a different one from spatial or
pattern relation.
Thus an image useful for making an exit requires the recognition of a
door as a distinct entity, of its spatial relation to the observer, and its
meaning as a hole for getting out. These are not truly separable. The
visual recognition of a door is matted together with its meaning as a
door. It is possible, however, to analyze the door in terms of its
identity of form and clarity of position, considered as if they were
prior to its meaning.
Such an analytic feat might be pointless in the study of a door, but not
in the study of the urban environment. To begin with, the question of
meaning in the city is a complicated one. Group images of meaning
are less likely to be consistent at this level than are the perceptions of
entity and relationship. Meaning, moreover, is not so easily influenced
by physical manipulation as are these other two components. If it is
our purpose to build cities for the enjoyment of vast numbers of people
of widely diverse background-and cities which will also be
adaptable to future purposes-we may even be wise to concentrate on
the physical clarity of the image and to allow meaning to
develop without our direct guidance. The image of the Manhattan sky-
where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply
and intensely to the senses.
Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object
and called it apparency.74 While art is not limited to this single end, he
felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by
clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly
comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first
step toward the expression of inner meaning.
A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar
sense would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite
the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous
grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also
extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that could be
apprehended over time as a pat- tern of high continuity with many
distinctive parts clearly inter- connected. The perceptive and familiar
observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of his
basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous
elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He
would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice might
be an example of such a highly imageable environment. In the United
States, one is tempted to cite parts of Manhattan, San Francisco,
Boston, or perhaps the lake front of Chicago.
These are characterizations that flow from our definitions. The concept
of imageability does not necessarily connote something fixed, limited,
precise, unified, or regularly ordered, although it may sometimes have
these qualities. Nor does it mean apparent at a glance, obvious, patent,
or plain. The total environment to be patterned is. highly complex,
while the obvious image is soon boring, and can point to only a few
features of the living world.
The imageability of city form will be the center of the study to follow.
There are other basic properties in a beautiful environment: meaning
or expressiveness, sensuous delight, rhythm, stimulus, choice. Our
concentration on imageability does not deny their importance. Our
purpose is simply to consider the need for identity and structure in our
perceptual world, and to illustrate the special relevance of this quality
to the particular case of the complex, shifting urban environment.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City
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